So they guy from Quirkey Blog created a new way to run web apps. It’s based on sammy.js. Sammy.js, in turn, is based on Sinatra. Sinatra is a very light weight web framework for Ruby. Sammy uses CouchDB for back-end storage.

The idea behind Sammys is that the web browser talks directly to the data store. It doesn’t have to go through a web server (or application server) to get things done. So all the routing is done in Javascript, in the browser.

It amuses me to see the industry vacillate between thick clients and thin clients. I mean in the beginning there was the thin client, with the mainframe as the server. Everything was good.

Then the PC revolution happened, and the thick client became fashionable. I think it happened because the wire protocols at the time could not handle the rich experience that the PC offered.

Then the Web 2.0 revolution happened, and we went back to thin clients. The browser was a fairly simple display front-end to the app that sat on the web servers.

But slowly the web browsers are becoming more and more powerful. With HTML 5 and ever faster Javascript engines, the browsers is becoming the new platform-independent GUI toolkit.

And once again we can do richer things in the browser than the wire protocal allows, so the client is becoming thick again.

So I guess in a few years time we’ll going thin client again. I wonder what the technology shift will be to make it happen?

Sometime over the past week Google quietly increased the version number of its Chromium development browser to 4.0 and it is every bit as fast at rendering web pages as version 3.0 was.

Officially Google only releases its browser as Chrome, and it doesn’t actually have a Linux version available yet so many Linux users have yet to give Chrome a spin. But Google does also regularly release development versions of Chromium for Linux, Windows and Mac platforms which offers all the benefits of bleeding edge Chrome development without the assurance of a “stable” tag.

Earlier this month Google released a beta version of Chrome 3.0 for Windows and said that it was as much as 30% faster than any other browser. I haven’t had an opportunity to test Chrome 3.0 on Windows so I don’t know how true that is but I did test a Chromium 3.0 version on Linux and – here’s the thing – it is almost 50% faster than Firefox3.5 on the same platform at rendering web pages.

I ran Opera 9.63, Firefox 3.5 and Google Chromium 3x through the SunSpider Javascript test (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html). Firefox 3.5 turned in a very respectable 1766ms turn of speed. Which is enough to put it miles ahead of Opera’s sluggish 7613ms but not a patch on Google Chromium 3.0 which turned a score of 719ms. So, when it comes to rending pages it seems that Chrome has some legitimate claim to the fastest browser title.

Subsequently, however, a Chromium 4.0 version was released (I’m currently running version 4.0.204.0) and it is proving to be every bot as good as 3.0.

Instructions for installing Chromium builds on Linux can be found on the Chromium dev website. There are also a number of distro-specific builds available including for Ubuntu and Fedora.